Amy Casey: Painter of Precarious Fantasy Buildings & Worlds

Amy Casey is a painter and Cleveland native who has a style all her own. Her pieces are of tangled, rickety, and unstable worlds that are unreal enough to excite the imagination, but realistic enough to hit home. With events in the last decade as any indication, today’s society feels increasingly insecure, as if everything could fall down at any moment; Amy Casey taps into this with a beautiful array of work:

As if out of Tim Burton’s imagination (though his version would be darker), Amy Casey likes to create tentacle like vines that always seem to be reaching toward you, ready to pull your precariously balanced life into a pile of rubble. She has no problem depicting what happens after the collapse, either.

We’re all in this together! Amy creates a unique sense of community by piling enough upside down and topsy turvy communities against each other that it’s obvious a single missing piece would cause the whole thing to crash down. All of the struts and structure only provide the illusion of solidity.

When the destruction is over, the piles of debris create a sense of chaos that is almost more action oriented than her action pieces. In my opinion, the serenity of the moment right before the collapse is much more tranquil than the moments after (I thought there would be some sense of relief, that the worst had already happened).